It's hard to overstate Van Halen's impact in the world of rock music. Led by Eddie Van Halen's ferocious, fiery and always innovative guitar playing, Van Halen carved out a niche in music that hadn't existed before, and spawned innumerable imitators.

As you might've detected from the non-stop (and fairly annoying) TV commercials, Minions opened in theaters today. The animated comedy, which is about gibberish-spewing yellow creatures who are looking for someone to serve, happens to feature a touch of Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption."

Below, check out a — let's face it — crappy-quality video of the Fabulous Thunderbirds performing "The Crawl" in what I call the good ol' days of Texas rock and blues (1984), with Jimmie's big brother, Stevie Ray Vaughan, sitting in.

Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar tone was as dry as a San Antonio summer and as sparkling clean as a Dallas debutante, the product of the natural sound of amps with ample clean headroom. However, Vaughan occasionally used pedals to augment his sound, mainly to boost the signal, although he occasionally employed a rotating speaker cabinet and wah pedals for added textural flair.

Responding to the needs of pedalboard users and players whose high-gain effects create difficult-to-ontrol hum and noise, EHX has developed The Silencer, a sophisticated noise gate that can tame a single pedal or an entire effects loop.